1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tape printing device for printing desired bar codes on a tape.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. HEI-5-177898 has proposed a tape printer including a keyboard, a display, and a print mechanism. The print mechanism is capable of printing characters, such as letters, symbols, and the like, on different width tapes (for example, 12 mm and 18 mm wide tapes) that are housed in cassettes. In particular, the tape mechanism is capable of printing bar codes on the tape with and in addition to the characters. The tape printer described in Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. HEI-5-177898 is well-suited printing file names on tapes that can be adhered to the back of files as identification labels.
Recently, another Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. HEI-5-185695 has proposed a tape printer for printing numbered character strings, made from inputted strings of numbers, on a tape while numbering processes are performed to increment numbering of successive character strings. This publication has proposed a structure also capable of performing numbering processes by incrementing or counting up at a line order of alphabetic characters.
With the popularization of office automation equipment, there is a general demand to computerize records of magnetic media, such as magnetic tapes and floppy disks, or of vast numbers of books in libraries. Keeping track of magnetic media or books can be easily performed by producing bar codes with category codes, that are for categorizing fields of magnetic media or books, and number codes associated with these categories, adhering the bar codes to the magnetic media or books, and reading the bar codes with a bar code reader.
The printer described in Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. HEI-5-177898 allows printing bar codes based on effective characters that are made from inputted numbers, characters, and the like. The printer described in Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. HEI-5-185695 allows performing numbering processes on numbered character strings (made from strings of numbers), but not on bar codes.
Therefore, to print a plurality of bar codes as labels, effective character strings, that are made from common character strings indicating categories and from number strings for sequentially numbering the categories, must be repeatedly inputted while sequentially incrementing the number strings. These processes complicated operations to print numbered bar code labels.